


a flower at my feet

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Series: the good left undone [1]
Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Enjolras is a Bit of a Moron, Multi, Musichetta Low-Key Runs a Coffee Shop, Rampant Abuse of Parentheticals in First Chapter, but I love him anyway, Éponine is Not Here for This Shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-07-15 09:30:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7216972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eponine remembers when she's ten.  Les Amis take a little more work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. bending there in my direction

**Author's Note:**

> So, first off, my computer doesn't like accents, so my French names are terrible. Fortunately I do not speak French, so this doesn't drive me up the wall. Sorry if you do, and it does.
> 
> Second, I've had the first chapter of this done for like...a good solid three months? Yeah, probably. I just keep forgetting to post it. Next chapter's going to be a bit delayed because [things we lost in the fire](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7196675/chapters/16332587) is taking precedence, but the next chapter (and the sequel, which will both ACTUALLY have Grantaire in it) are still going to happen.
> 
> Third, shower my beta [ThoseWhoFavorFire](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ThoseWhoFavorFire/pseuds/ThoseWhoFavorFire) with love, she's the only reason I remembered to fucking post this.
> 
> Fourth, all the titles for everything are from the Rise Against song The Good Left Undone because I have a lot of feelings about my revolutionary children and about punk rock modern Eponine.

Eponine is ten, with parents who hate her and a little brother she’s terrified for, when she gets hit in the chest with a pebble.  Some other kid tossed it and it’s pouring rain and they probably didn’t even see her, but she goes down like she’s been shot.

She kind of has.

The whole world is exploding around her and she can _feel_ it in her chest, the hot spike of agony under her ribcage.  She barely manages to scramble around the corner of the school, curling up out of sight in the lee of the building, and goes to pieces.

Cosette finds her there not ten minutes later, sobbing and clutching at her chest as if to hold her skin together.

(This is how Cosette and Eponine became friends: they were both seven and Cosette had no friends because she had just moved into town.  Eponine had no friends because she had scared everyone off when her parents lost their money.  Cosette saw the other girl sitting alone at lunch, marched over, and sat herself down with all the lordly determination of a cat.)

(“Hi, I’m Cosette, I’m seven and I’m new and my papa gave me a brownie for lunch today, do you want to share?”)

(Everyone knows that chocolate is the ultimate bargaining chip.  Eponine sold her soul for half a brownie and regrets nothing, because Mssr. Valjean’s brownies are the sort of thing you kill a man for.)

“’Ponine?” Cosette asks anxiously.  She’s never seen Eponine cry before, not even the time she walked to Cosette’s house in February wearing nothing but a t-shirt, jeans, and bruises.  Not even when Mssr. Valjean—as Eponine insists on calling him—tried to make her go to the hospital about it.

Eponine drags her face up and stares at Cosette as if she’s never seen her before, like Cosette is a stranger rather than the person who spends all her time at Eponine’s side.

The words that spill from Eponine’s mouth aren’t their usual easy French.  They’re archaic, strangely accented, grief-stricken.

It’s the language that makes Cosette remember.  Eponine vaguely recognizes that it’s clearly not as severe for the delicate blonde, but she’s too busy remembering that she’s not actually dying to do anything else.

“’Ponine?” Cosette asks, crouching down in front of her friend and cupping Eponine’s face in her hands.  The rain water is cold and slick and awful and--  “Eponine, look at me!”

Eponine blinks hard, once, twice, three times, and she’s looking at Marius—at Cosette—Marius?

“No, it’s me, it’s Cosette, Marius isn’t here,” Cosette says, starting to cry herself.  “Eponine, please, what’s wrong?”

“I am dying,” Eponine says, in that strange old tongue, voice faint and distant.  “My hand is pierced by a ball…”

“No, you’re fine, you’re okay,” Cosette insists, and her fingertips pressing into Eponine’s jaw are eight points of reality, cold and firm.  She blinks again.  Marius.  No, Cosette.

“Cosette,” Eponine says, and her voice is raw from sobbing.  “What’s happening?”

“You’re remembering.  We both are, I think.”  Cosette tries to stroke Eponine’s hair out of her face, the locks stuck to her skin and tangled with water.  “Are you…okay?”

“I’m still pretty sure I’m dying,” Eponine says with the worst attempt at a laugh she’s heard from herself in years.  “I.  There’s no way I can go to class.”

“Right,” Cosette says, steel entering her pale blue eyes.  For a second, Eponine has a powerful vision of her friend dressed in student’s garb, wielding a rifle and a ferocious expression.  It’s easy, fitting—is it a relief that Cosette wasn’t one of them, or a shame that she never went to war, Eponine wonders.  “Come with me.”

Cosette slings one of Eponine’s arms over her shoulders and supports her on the way into the school, steering them directly into the nurse’s office.  Fortunately or otherwise, Eponine looks terrible, and the nurse takes one look at Cosette’s wide blue eyes and trembling lip and hands over a phone.

“Papa,” Cosette weeps.  Eponine is too blurry to tell if Cosette’s distress is real or manufactured for the nurse’s benefit—blinking is still making reality blur around her.  “Something’s wrong with ‘Ponine, she’s sick, and my head hurts so much, please, you have to come get us, please, Papa.”

Mssr. Valjean is a good man, a good father.  The kind of father Eponine would have wanted for herself and her brother if she’d had her choice in the matter.  He comes and gets them immediately.  Cosette hurls herself into his broad chest, sobbing as if he’s been raised from the dead and ranting about watching him die.

“Shh,” he says, stroking her long blonde hair without answering her.  He tucks one arm around her and picks her up as if she weighs nothing at all.  “It’s all right.  I’ll take you home.  Eponine, come on.”

Eponine forces herself to her feet and reaches out blindly to take his offered hand.  His palm engulfs hers and he pulls her close to his side, hand resting on her shoulder.

“Do you remember?” Eponine manages to ask as she curls into the backseat of his car.  There was a moment of panic when she approached the car and didn’t recognize it, heard wild thoughts about horseless carriages polished to a shine.

“Remember what?” he asks as he peels Cosette from him and tucks her next to Eponine.

“ _Before_.”

(This is how they know Mssr. Valjean remembers _before_ : Cosette dozes off in the car and wakes up when they stop at her house, crying for Marius, and her father scoops her out of the car and hugs her as if he can put the world right, and doesn’t ask any questions.)

(He looks at Eponine and says, “I didn’t know you, back then.”)

(Eponine, sitting at their kitchen table with a mug of hot chocolate and a blanket wrapped around her like a cloak, looks up at him with the eyes of a woman who has seen war and says, “I was the first to die on the barricade.”)

(Mssr. Valjean pulls some strings and gets them the next two days off, and lets them sit on the floor under blankets until the universe makes sense again.)

Things are not normal after that.  They can’t be.  Sometimes Eponine and Cosette are walking around Paris with Valjean and they’ll pause and linger over a street or an alley, or see something in their history class and swap a quick glance.  Their speech changes, landing somewhere between _now_ and _then_ , with all the articulation of grown women.  Eponine learns everything there is to know about Cosette’s once-life, and tells her everything about her own.  There is an entire day that is nothing but Eponine listing all of the sins she can remember committing against Cosette and begging for forgiveness.  There is another that is nothing but Cosette apologizing for Marius and for Eponine’s poor stupid heart.

So, no, ‘normal’ isn’t the word.  But by the time Eponine turns eleven and starts bringing her little brother—just recently five—to Cosette’s, they’re balanced.  Eponine is shockingly upset that she never got to be friends with Cosette the last time around, and there has been at least one night of Cosette waking up in hysterical tears at the thought of Eponine, dead before they met.

Her little brother is six before Eponine sees him dart out into the street and bolts out after him, dragging him back as she yells.

“Gavroche, you almost gave me a goddamn heart attack!” she shouts, and he stares up at her.  God, Eponine loves being able to swear without getting judgy looks, she _loves_ the twenty-first century, fight her on this.

“Eponine?” he asks slowly, and she runs her sentence through her mind again.  Shit.  Fuck.  She can barely remember what his real name was, the last time around.  It’s definitely not Gavroche, this time, but he doesn’t seem to think she’s crazy.  “Eponine,” he breathes, and throws himself at her.  She crushes him to her, this stupid reckless kid that she’s somehow raising for the second time.  “You died,” he mumbles into her stomach.

“I know,” she says quietly.  “But it’s all okay now.”

The next person they find is Marius.  It’s _years_ later, they’re sixteen and Eponine keeps her hair in a pixie cut and has custody of Gavroche (it was ugly and they don’t talk about it) and wears bright red lipstick.  Cosette still wears her hair long and loose, like cornsilk, and she wears pretty sundresses and pale silver eyeshadow.  They wander Paris holding hands, or with their arms linked together, or with Eponine’s arm slung around Cosette’s shoulders, and they tell stories about the people passing by.

It’s good.

The lanky figure sprints up to them out of nowhere on a lovely late spring day, hurtling toward Cosette like a missile.  Eponine catches an arm and hurls him over her shoulder onto the ground without thinking.

(This is how Eponine copes with two lives of horrible parents and one life of fighting a revolution: combat training, _real_ combat training this time, the kind that sends her home with bruises and bloody lips and wildly triumphant eyes and the knowledge that she can take care of herself and her own.)

(She jokingly calls it RTSD—Reincarnation Traumatic Stress Disorder—and it’s funny except when she wakes up sure that she’s dying or panics breathlessly at some tiny trigger or clings to Gavroche like he’ll disappear if she lets him go.)

(The fighting helps.  It helps a lot.  She believes in throwing punches first and asking questions later.)

“Who the fuck,” she starts to snarl, then blinks in surprise at the narrow face gasping for air against the pavement.  “Jesus fuck,” she says with feeling.  She still loves to swear, in case anyone’s curious.  “Marius?”

He rolls more fully onto his back and gapes up at her.  “’Ponine?”  From the sounds of it, she knocked the wind out of him.  She doesn’t feel as guilty as she probably should, because that’s what happens when you rush people without warning.  It’s also holding back his usual rambling, so she can count her blessings.

“Marius!” Cosette cries, and drops to her knees without ceremony to kiss him.  Eponine expects to feel some of that old, familiar ache, but instead there’s only a beat of nostalgic fondness.  She politely allows them their moment, then offers her hand to Marius once Cosette releases him.

“Sorry about that,” Eponine says unapologetically as she pulls him to his feet.  “Don’t rush people.”

“I can’t believe you’re here,” Marius says, heaving in a few deep breaths until he can straighten up completely.  “I just—oh my gosh, you’re _here_ , are the others here?”

“We haven’t found them,” Eponine says with a shrug.  “It’s just us, Gavroche, and Monsieur Valjean.”

“Papa,” Cosette says, as if Marius might have missed that detail.  She holds out her hand shyly and Marius links his fingers through hers, pulling her close.

Eponine is more okay with this than she expected to be.  She’s happy.  Her best friend and the man she had believed she was in love with—they deserve good things.  And she deserves to live her own life for once, and she wants to wear red lipstick and dance all night and teach Gavroche to cheat at cards.  Being in love with Marius…she doesn’t want that so much anymore.

So Marius joins them, and Valjean gives him a wary look at first but clearly remembers that this man made Cosette deliriously happy for a lifetime already, so there is no shovel talk forthcoming.

That doesn’t stop Eponine and Gavroche, though, who cheerfully corner Marius to threaten him with fates most dire should he be seized by any sudden fits of idiocy.

After Marius, it’s Jehan.  Eponine and Cosette are seventeen, and Eponine has a spectacular panic attack when she wakes up on the morning of her seventeenth birthday convinced that she is going to die this year.  Now it’s June 5th and Cosette is taking Eponine and Marius out to drink and dance and forget if it kills them all.  They start early, walking together to a bar through the spring afternoon.

The young man with his hair pulled back into a many-stranded braid and a truly awful shirt covered in a pattern of daisies is familiar, but it’s the book of medieval poetry an inch from his nose that clinches it.

“Jehan?” Eponine calls automatically, and Marius bounds forward.

“Jehan!” he shouts with all his usual puppy-like enthusiasm, and the young man looks up in surprise.  “Jehan, do you remember me?  Look, you still read poetry, well, of course you still read poetry, do you still write?  I hoped we’d find you, oh, wow, that shirt is…really something and _what_ are those shoes.”

“Mar-ius?” Jehan says slowly, as if fitting the name to the face.  “Marius,” he repeats more firmly, and his smile blooms across his face like sunshine.  “You’re back.  _I’m_ back,” he revises, looking bemused.  Eponine waits for the breakdown, but Jehan always had that strange ethereal calm about him, so instead of bursting into hysterics he rises from where he’s sprawled on the grass to give Marius a fierce hug.  His eyes are a little damp when he pulls back, but he’s beaming.  “And I love these shoes,” he adds, wiggling his toes inside…bedazzled high-top Converse in a violent shade of green, unless Eponine is hallucinating vividly.  “I remember you,” he says to Eponine.  “You…”

“I hung around before the fighting and I died first,” Eponine says bluntly.  She’s discovered that sometimes it’s best to get straight to the point.  “I’m Eponine.  Nice to meet you properly.”

“Oh, and Jehan, this is Cosette,” Marius says with an adoring smile.  “She’s--”

“Yes, I know who Cosette is, I remember,” Jehan hurries to say, cutting through Marius’ ramble.  Cosette flushes prettily, pink staining her cheeks, and offers a hand to shake.  “I don’t think I ever had the pleasure,” Jehan adds with his sunny smile, taking her hand and tugging her in so that he can peck her cheek.  Once he releases her, he pounces on Eponine, to her surprise.  He hugs her like an old friend and his lips just brush her skin, and she hesitantly hugs him back.

She always wanted to be part of Les Amis, and now that one of them is greeting her like a sister she’s not sure what to do.

“You were really brave,” he tells her quietly.  “I wanted to be as brave as you.”

She doesn’t burst into tears, but it’s a near thing, and Jehan bounces along with them toward the bar with his hand in hers and his arm around Marius.  He seems like the same person he was then, prone to rhapsodies about beauty and death when drunk—and they are all _very_ drunk by midnight, as Cosette planned—and he is like sunlight bound in skin beside Eponine.

(This is how they find Joly: he sees Eponine cut her hand on the edge of a broken plate in the coffee shop she works at, and rushes up with a tirade about the importance of disinfecting wounds.  He talks so fast and passionately that her hand is cleaned and bandaged before she remembers how to stop gaping and interrupt him.)

(“Do you know me?” she asks hesitantly.)

(He does not.)

(He continues not to know these strange people for two months.  He thinks they’re endearing, but possibly quite mad, and talks about doing a study in group obsessions to explain their apparent collective fixation on the 1800’s.  One day they walk through the doors of Eponine’s workplace, dropping her off for a shift, and there is a new hire at the counter, petite and dark and lovely, talking to a tall man with a shaved head.)

(Joly shrieks and almost faints straight into Bousset’s arms, who exhibits his usual degree of grace and almost drops him straight onto the tiles.)

(Musichetta screams in delight, hugs him, kisses him emphatically, punches him in the face, and screams again, all in very quick succession.  It’s a busy day.)

They enter university, some of them.  Eponine and Cosette and Jehan and Joly just out of school, Marius after a gap year.  Bousset decides to take a year off to figure out what he wants to do, dropping his classes in favor of bouncing fluidly from one job to another, and Musichetta blithely announces that she’s perfectly happy working in the coffee shop and singing at open mic nights.  They’ve been in school for three months and it’s turning bitterly cold when they find Bahorel, and they find Bahorel because Eponine finds trouble.

So it goes like this.  It starts as a civil in-class discussion about the merits of the pro-choice movement.  It’s now a not-so-civil out-of-class shouting match, Eponine against three young men, all of them bigger than her, about a case that recently hit the news, a woman who went to trial for getting an abortion after a rape.  Eponine is _breathless_ with the stupidity of her opponents, and so high on adrenaline that she could probably be shot in the chest again without noticing it.

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ _,_ ” she shouts because she can’t believe what she’s hearing.  “Are you using the ‘men can’t control themselves’ argument with me right now?  Is that actually the tack you’re taking?  God, I’m embarrassed _for_ you!”

Yeah, that’s about when it turns violent.  In retrospect she probably could have tried harder to keep it peaceful.

She doesn’t notice the walking brick house wading into the fight to help her until he laughs, inches from her side, and says, “I think Enjolras would have liked you, last time around.”

Eponine’s brain runs a tally and comes up with exactly one person who would fit the description of ‘fighting and joking about it.’  “Bahorel?” she says in surprise, head whipping around to see him toss one of their opponents to the ground.

“Stay down this time,” he orders, and the student doesn’t test his luck.  “That’s me,” he tells Eponine brightly as she flips another student over her hip and jams his arm up behind his back until he cries for her to let him go.  “I need a drink after this,” he says brightly as the two of them each grab an arm and take down the last student.  “You know a place?”

“Yep,” Eponine says, dusting herself off.  “Follow me.”

When the others find them, they’re sitting in a bar at four in the afternoon, more than a little tipsy and laughing, with bruises blooming on their faces and scraped knuckles.  Bahorel is welcomed with utter jubilation.

They find Feuilly less than a week later.  He’s had a stressful day and Bahorel takes him by surprise, earning a black eye before remembrance kicks in.  Feuilly feels terrible about it until he hears the story of Joly thinking they were all insane, the story of Musichetta punching Joly even after knowing who he was, and the story of Marius getting thrown over Eponine’s shoulder.  Then he lowers his head to the table with great ceremony and laughs helplessly until they slide another beer into his hand.  Jehan pets his curly red hair and Bahorel grins under the ice pack Joly foisted upon him.  Musichetta ghosts in and out of the back room of the coffee shop during her breaks, swooping down to give Feuilly a kiss on the cheek and an “I’m Musichetta, I don’t think we met last time,” exactly the way she’s greeted everyone except her boys.

Things are quiet for a long time after that.  Years.  Cosette and Marius get engaged, again, and Valjean is pleased to discover that most of the reincarnated Amis are more than happy to acquire a gruff uncle-figure.  Joly, Bousset, and Musichetta get an apartment that’s barely big enough for two, let alone all three of them.  Eponine and Cosette still live together with Gavroche, although Cosette spends a decent amount of time at Marius’, and Jehan eventually gives up on trying to make ends meet with his poetry and moves into their apartment, too.  It’s crowded, but Eponine is speechless with how much she loves having everyone there, close enough to touch.  She’s properly one of them, this time around, listening to Jehan’s poetry and getting phone calls when Bahorel lands himself in hospital after a fist fight.  The first time she comes down with a cold, Joly turns up on her doorstep armed to the teeth with vitamin C and soups—she recovers in record time.  It’s _good_ and she’s happy and she thinks that it was worth dying, to get this second lifetime.

(This is the truth: not everything is so easy.  Sometimes it’s hard to keep their timelines straight, ranging over Paris as they do.) 

(One day Jehan calls her in near-hysterics—he’s wandered too far, landed in the Musain’s old neighborhood, and although the inn is gone, the air, he says, is the same.  She ‘borrows’ Bousset’s car and a blanket from Cosette’s nest to go get him, and she and Jehan spend the rest of the day on the couch with Gavroche, watching movies and drinking hot chocolate.  She calls Cosette to tell her what happened, and when she and Marius get home from their day trip, they find the three of them curled tightly together, asleep.) 

(Her old joke about RTSD enters common use, a shorthand for when Musichetta wakes up screaming herself hoarse at the image of her boys, dead, side by side, for when Bahorel can’t breathe around the bayonet in his ribs except by going out to pick a fight, for when it rains lightly and Eponine shakes down to her bones.  For when Marius finds two paintings of a golden-haired god and his friends up for auction, in addition to a half-scorched sketchbook, all signed with a large, stylized R, and all of them sit in his apartment in shocked silence.  It’s said with a quirk of the lips and bared teeth, something that’s only funny because they force themselves to laugh instead of lying down and never moving again.)

(It’s dark and twisted and Eponine is crushingly proud of them every time she hears the phrase.)

Eponine and Cosette are debating the merits of getting a job at a large paper and making a name for yourself by selling your soul versus getting a job at a small but virtuous one and probably never getting your words out when Jehan, practically bouncing with excitement, drags two men into the coffee shop.  He found them in the library, he announces, and Courfeyrac was trying to convince Combeferre to blow off his homework.

It shocks absolutely no one that Courfeyrac and Combeferre met before Jehan got his hands on them.  There are more delighted reunions, tears and laughter and tight hugs.  Gavroche almost bowls Courfeyrac over and the lanky man is suddenly hard-pressed to resist crying outright as he hugs the boy fiercely.

“Where’s Enjolras?” Combeferre finally asks, and the two of them do seem oddly unbalanced without their golden-haired third.

Eponine shakes her head apologetically.  “Haven’t found him yet.”

“Ah, and you must be little Gav’s lovely sister,” Courfeyrac declares, sweeping up her hand and kissing the back of it.  She stares at him, grinning.  It’s good to see that his humor is as good as ever.  “I never had the privilege of meeting you properly.”

“That’s enough,” Combeferre says with a sigh, towing him back by the collar.  “I’m Combeferre, this is Courfeyrac.”

“Eponine,” she says.  “And I know who you are.  With you two I believe we’ve found everyone except Enjolras and Grantaire.”

“Really?”  Combeferre looks startled.  “When Jehan said that most of the others were back…”

“Trust me, I expected him to turn up too,” Eponine says dryly.  Somehow she seems to have been elected spokesperson, sometime around when they found Joly, and she dearly hopes that Enjolras gets a move-on so that she can pawn the duty off onto its rightful patsy.  Other reasons too, obviously, because Enjolras was a fucking glory even from a distance, fire and wrath and pure, hard metal, but _God_ does she ever want to have someone else take the reins.  “We’ll find him,” she says, trying to sound confident.  “We will.”

Maybe she has some potential at this thing after all, because everyone seems convinced.

So.  Enjolras.

To absolutely no one’s surprise, Enjolras crashes (back) into their lives with no shortage of brisk aplomb.  He takes his sweet time about it, too, the fucker—Eponine’s in her third year of university.

Eponine is talking to Courfeyrac, waiting for Combeferre to come out of his last lecture of the day, when someone clears their throat behind him.

“Excuse me,” says a sharp, well-articulated voice, the kind of voice made for rallying troops and calling orders, and Courfeyrac goes paper white and drops everything he’s holding—his phone makes a sinister crack upon hitting the pavement.  “Have you heard about the protest next weekend--” the voice starts, but they don’t get to finish, because Courfeyrac spins on the spot and hurls himself at the red-coated speaker like a particularly lanky missile.

True to form, Enjolras manages to save the fliers in his hand and catch Courfeyrac without trouble.

“ _Enjolras_ ,” Courfeyrac says, hugging him fiercely.  Enjolras is tellingly stiff, and Courfeyrac holds him at arms-length, asking uneasily, “Do you know me?”

Enjolras blinks for a long moment, then recognition washes over his face and his severe features break into a glowing smile.  “Courfeyrac,” he says warmly, and Courfeyrac yanks him back into a hug so all-engulfing that Enjolras is reduced to a head of mussed golden hair and a red jacket.

“Enjolras?” Combeferre says from the door of the lecture hall, and Eponine’s never heard him timid before, but that’s definitely the best word for his tone now.  Enjolras pries himself free from Courfeyrac’s surprisingly comprehensive hold and Combeferre takes a few shaky steps forward before he seems to just _fall_ into Enjolras.  There are definitely some tears among the three of them, and Eponine quietly slips her phone out of her pocket.

_WE FOUND E_ , she types into a group text.  _NOT A DRILL.  MEET AT ABC IMMEDIATELY._   Musichetta swears blind that she had nothing to do with the renaming of the coffee shop.  No one, not even Joly, believes her.

Her phone immediately starts to vibrate as everyone commences a full-scale conniption.  She shoves it into her pocket again as Enjolras and the others separate and he looks over at her, with the vague recognition she’s come to expect from Les Amis.

“I’m sorry,” he says, just as crisply polite this time around as last.  “I don’t recall your name.”

“Eponine,” she says, a smile starting to spread across her own face.  “I’ve been keeping an eye on your comrades for you, but I’ll thank you to take them off my hands.”

“You died on the barricade,” Enjolras says, blue eyes shrewd.  “Saving Marius.”

“Yes,” she says.  “He lived,” she adds, because this matters to them, that one of them lived through that awful fight, and it matters to her that her sacrifice wasn’t in vain.  She’s thanked Valjean for it more times than she can count.  “He married Cosette.”

Enjolras smiles faintly.  “That’s good.  I’m glad someone made it out in spite of my folly.”

Combeferre and Courfeyrac appear to be genuinely struck dumb by this, but Eponine was ready for it, wondering how this meeting would go ever since she was a child, so she gets there first.

She slaps him.  It’s an act that’s much more Eponine-who-died than Eponine-who-lives, but it works, leaving him speechless.

“You listen to me,” she snarls, stabbing a finger into his chest.  “Don’t you fucking _dare_ take that away from us.  You think for one second that we would have fought just for your pretty words and pretty face if we didn’t believe in what you were doing?”  He opens his mouth and she pokes him again, harder.  “Did I say you could talk?  We fought because we knew you were right, and because the people we loved were fighting, and if you for _one minute_ try to steal that from us by blaming yourself, we’re going to find out how well this reincarnation thing works, because I will kill you.  I will _fucking_ murder you, because I have remembered this bullshit for eleven years and knowing that I fought and died on my own choice was all that kept me going some days.  All that kept my _brother_ going some days, and I will _gladly_ kill you for taking that away.”  She breathes, shaky, and asks quietly, “Am I clear?”

Enjolras looks down at her for a long moment, because he is taller than her and she probably doesn’t look as menacing as she wants to.  His lips are parted in surprise and a red mark is rising on his cheek, because she is strong and put a lot of force into that slap.

“I think it’s a shame we didn’t meet last time,” he says at last, sounding bemused.  “I suppose we’re clear.”

“Good, because I’m going to have my goddamn eye on you.  Okay,” Eponine says briskly, pulling out her phone and cringing slightly at the number of texts there—forty-nine.  “The others will probably launch a search party if we don’t go meet them at the ABC, so.”  She makes a gesture as if conducting an orchestra and the three men follow her as she starts toward the road, her boots thudding against the ground.

“Who have you found?  Who else is here?” Enjolras asks, with the stiff eagerness she remembers from watching him greet his friends the last time around.

“Almost everyone,” Combeferre says immediately.  “Jehan found Courf and me at the library last year, and before that was…who?”

“Feuilly,” Eponine says.  “Bahorel.  Bousset and Musichetta found each other first, then us.  Joly thought we were crazy until we found the other two.  Jehan.  Marius when we were sixteen.  And Cosette and I grew up together this time around, since before we remembered.”

“Not Grantaire?” Enjolras asks with all the shrewd intelligence she remembers.

“No sign of him,” she says, because while Eponine doesn’t believe in softening the truth much anymore, she’s also pretty sure that Enjolras is better off without seeing the paintings and sketches Marius keeps in storage.  She never saw Enjolras and Grantaire go more than a day without getting into a shouting match, and she’s quite confident that their golden leader would react poorly to the way Grantaire saw him.  Better for everybody if she doesn’t get into it.

There’s a pause and his face does something she doesn’t recognize in her periphery.  “How are they?” Enjolras asks. 

Eponine shrugs.  “You know, they’re reincarnated revolutionaries.  We’ve all got our issues.  Mostly we’re okay.  Cosette and Marius are engaged again, and Jehan lives with me and Gavroche—and I guess technically Cosette, but she sleeps at Marius’ more often than not.  Joly, Musichetta, and Bousset are together again, have been for a while.  We have more good days than bad ones.”  She shoots a look at him, sidelong.  “We’ve all been slowly dying of impatience while you got your ass in gear.  What are those even for?” she adds, nodding to his fliers.

“Protest,” he says crisply.  “For women’s rights.”

“Of course they are,” Courfeyrac says, tossing an arm around Enjolras’ shoulders.  The blond submits to it with good grace and a fond smile.  “I’ve missed having a cause.”

“And this time around we’re a lot less likely to get shot wholesale,” Eponine notes, voice as bland as she can make it.  They slow to a halt outside the ABC and she pushes the door open, leading the three of them into the back room Musichetta quietly claimed for them.  Through means unknown and possibly illegal, everyone is already there, even Gavroche, who definitely has school at the moment.  She’s willing to let it slide today, though.  Her arrival sends out ripples through the room, voices lowering and bodies reorienting.  It’s strange, the way every conversation pauses when she appears now, heads turning toward her.  It’s the sort of response she remembers watching Enjolras command, before their deaths.

“Eponine,” Jehan says brightly, bounding toward her as she steps in.  Gavroche thuds into her and she huffs, wrapping an arm around his shoulders—he’s coming into some height now; he’ll probably be taller than her someday.  She can’t wait to see it.

The room explodes with noise.  All she can make out is Bahorel’s booming voice asking, “Were you serious?  You found him?”

She grins at their enthusiasm and steps away from the door with a flourish.

“May I present your long-lost commander,” she says wryly, and Enjolras steps through the door with a hesitant smile on his face.  She’s never seen him hesitant before—it’s novel.

His reticence proves unfounded almost at once, of course, as the breath of shock fades to be replaced by a roar of greeting.  Jehan, still standing near Eponine, hurls himself at Enjolras and the blond is put in the position of catching someone for the third time in an hour.  He looks mostly unbothered when the others seem to take it as permission to mob him, burying him briefly under the onslaught of welcoming hands and teary laughter. 

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Cosette says shyly once he’s managed to extricate himself and Enjolras gives her a quick once-over, clearly noticing the engagement ring on her hand.

“You must be Marius’ Cosette.  He spoke highly of you,” he says with an admirably straight face, and she nods, fond resignation flickering over her face as Marius blushes faint scarlet.  “So does Eponine.”  At that, Cosette grins properly, shooting a look over Enjolras’ shoulder at Eponine, who shrugs.  She hadn’t said much, but if he wants to interpret it as ‘speaking highly,’ he’s welcome to do so.  Enjolras glances around the room and his gaze lands on the only other unfamiliar face—Musichetta, sitting on Bousset’s lap as he does service as her throne. 

She gives Enjolras a very skeptical look and asks, “So what happened to your face?”

Rueful, Enjolras raises his fingertips to his cheek, touching the reddened skin gently.  “Eponine.”

“Me too,” Marius mutters, and Cosette steers him by the collar back to a chair.  “What?” he protests as she pushes him down into the seat and pats him absently on the cheek.

“Hush, honey,” she says, and Eponine muffles a snicker.  Cosette turns a narrow look on her and manages to hold it for a few seconds before a grin cracks across her face and she asks, “How long did it take?”

“Not even five minutes,” Eponine says, and Cosette laughs.  “You owe me so much money.”

“You paid better attention than we thought, didn’t you?” Combeferre asks, and Eponine gives him a very dry look.  Enjolras laughs and there’s a great scuffle as three chairs are cleared up for them, Eponine opting to lean comfortably against a table instead.

“What happened?” Joly presses, looking concerned.

Eponine grins a little.  “We had a quick chat about exactly whose decisions led to our untimely deaths.”

“Oh, Enjolras,” Jehan says.  Jehan’s reproachful expression could make hardened murderers break down in guilt-ridden tears.  Enjolras shifts awkwardly under the poet’s gaze.  “Tell me you didn’t.”

“Well, he’s not going to do it again,” Courfeyrac says, amused.  “You really put some force into that, ‘Ponine.”  Eponine raises a hand in smug acknowledgement of the compliment, and Musichetta seems to wilt a little bit against Bousset’s chest, her righteous anger fading to a low crackle rather than the severe glint in her eye from before.  She reaches out and links her fingers through Joly’s, his long, delicate digits tangling with her own.

“So,” Eponine says, hopping up onto the table with a little hitch and crossing her legs so that she can rest an elbow on her knee and her chin on her fist.  “You said you had fliers for a protest, right, Enjolras?”

(This is how they spend their first Saturday reunited with their leader: bearing signs and chanting at the protest.  It turns out to actually be a counter-protest, defending a clinic against a mob of people spitting hateful words at girls and women on their way in.  Les Amis are more than happy to rally to the cause.)

(Enjolras is pressganged into service with a megaphone when the four students who organized the thing hear him conducting Les Amis through the chants like an old pro.  Dressed in his bright red jacket, gold curls windswept around his eyes, he commands attention and directs it where he wants it with ease.) 

(Bahorel is the first to go and offer a girl his arm, escorting her inside and looming pointedly in the direction of the protesters.  Feuilly does the same almost immediately, and Jehan soothes a teenaged girl on the verge of tears.  Musichetta has a brief word with the nurse who comes out to see, and the woman almost bursts into tears herself, locking the dark girl into a tight hug.)

(A protester crosses the inviolable line an hour in, red with anger and indignation.  Eponine appears in his path, apparently out of thin air, with a knife-like smile and the look of a woman at war.  The protester retreats so fast he almost sprains an ankle.)

(It’s good.)


	2. until the roots gave in

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grantaire proves elusive, Grantaire is found, Grantaire leaves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I should have written the next chapter of [things we lost in the fire](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7196675/chapters/16332587) but this was, like, halfway done anyway. So boom. Eponine being a badass on behalf of her friends. Drunk Eponine. Slightly famous mystery artist from the 1830's. Reincarnation pain for all your reincarnation pain needs.
> 
> As I mentioned in the last chapter notes, all titles are from Rise Against's song "The Good Left Undone" because it is my decree that modern Eponine listens to Rise Against.
> 
> Shoutout to the platonic love of my life, [ThoseWhoFavorFire](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ThoseWhoFavorFire/pseuds/ThoseWhoFavorFire), for making sure, and I quote, that shit's acceptable for public consumption.

They’re off kilter, Eponine thinks, an orchestra without a drumbeat to keep them on rhythm.

It’s not new, she can acknowledge that much.  They’ve been cobbled together piecemeal, smaller subsets of the larger group struggling to fill the gaps left by missing members, for so long now that it surprises her that they still notice.  She and Cosette used to pause awkwardly in their speech, every so often, waiting for Marius’ bubbly speech to fill the gap, Bahorel had seemed half-finished without Feuilly at his side.  Combferre and Courfeyrac had been perfectly capable of their usual give-and-take, but they stopped sometimes, looking at each other with silent frustration as a thought went unfinished without Enjolras to go tearing off with it in his teeth.

It’s just…different, now, as she looks around Marius’ living room.  Marius was still born into money, these days, but his parents haven’t disowned him this time around, and his spacious apartment is their preferred meeting place when the ABC is unavailable.  Everyone is here, or almost everyone, the room lit warmly and bodies sprawled comfortably on the floor and couches as they talk.  Joly is scribbling notes on the fresh pages of a notebook, laughing at Bousset’s commentary.  Musichetta, leaning against Bousset’s legs on the floor, has Jehan’s head in her lap, her strong musician’s fingers twining braids into his hair as his hands flit through the air, gesturing broadly as he talks to Feuilly.  Bahorel’s attention is split between their conversation and Courfeyrac, who has successfully dragged Enjolras and Combeferre into an utterly inane debate about…God knows what, really, the two of them are usually better at resisting his attempts.  Eponine can’t blame Bahorel for bursting out in the occasional booming laugh—she’s only caught a few words here and there, but she’s on the edge of laughter too.  Cosette is talking to Joly and Bousset, they’re making her laugh, and Marius is half-draped over her, eyes closed and a sleepy smile on his face.  Eponine is teaching Gavroche to pick handcuff locks (Courfeyrac’s idea, which she intends to murder him for), and wishing that Grantaire was here.

He’s the only one missing, since they found Enjolras three months ago, and his absence is so obvious it hurts.  Now they’re all missing beats in unison, and it turns it from small hiccups in individual conversation to the occasional universal hush as they wait for a voice that won’t come.  They’re together and they’re laughing, but they’re on a knife edge.

Joly and Bousset’s teasing banter with Cosette is easy, but every so often they start jokes and then there’s silence, waiting for a cutting remark to chime in.  Jehan and Feuilly are talking about philosophy and poetry and Feuilly keeps up all right, but then Jehan will pull out something genuinely obscure or incredibly oblique and Feuilly will absently glance around for someone to pick up the conversation.  And Enjolras seems oddly unmoored without the brilliant spark of his arguments with Grantaire—perhaps that’s why he let Courfeyrac pull him into such an absurd debate, in the absence of his usual partner.

Enjolras is weird about Grantaire, Eponine thinks to herself as she absently twists a hair clip in the handcuffs and clicks the metal off her wrists.  Gav tries to mimic it, face pinched into a thoughtful scowl as she claps the cuffs back onto herself.  Their fearless leader—oh, that was Grantaire’s nickname for him, wasn’t it, when it first caught on—doesn’t talk much about their missing friend, but when he comes up, Enjolras gets a strange look in his eye and shuts up pretty fast, which is unnerving beyond words.  At first Eponine thought it was anger, over Grantaire’s refusal to fight a losing battle (she doesn’t blame him, given how it turned out).  She’s not convinced, though, because it looks almost…sad.  No, stronger than that, it looks almost _grief-stricken_.  All the needling in the world won’t make Enjolras tell anyone what happened to Grantaire, even Combeferre’s attempts yielding absolutely nothing. 

They don’t even know if Grantaire died on the barricade, she realizes with a start, and snaps the handcuffs off her wrists as she sits upright quickly.  Cosette turns to her immediately, sensing something of her sudden urgency, and a ripple effect travels out from her, the room going quiet as faces turn.

“What happened to Grantaire?” she asks, and the good humor of the room tips over the knife edge into something melancholy, like she’s flipped a switch.  “Does anyone actually _know_ what happened to him?  Did he die on the barricade with us?”

“I don’t know,” Joly says, glancing around.  “I think he was still in the Musain when I.  Yeah.”

Heads shake, lips curve down. 

Musichetta sighs, in and out slowly, hands tangled in Jehan’s hair and keeping him in place as if letting go will let her hands tremble.  Her hands always tremble when she talks about this.  “He was…tall?”

“A little taller than Enjolras, only a bit,” Courfeyrac says quietly.  “He was a boxer and a dancer, he would have been well-muscled.  Dark hair.  He was wearing a green waistcoat.”

“He died,” she says, looking down at her hands.  She glances up and adds, “I saw him laid out at the Musain.”  Hesitant, she looks over to Enjolras, who, yes, has that same strange look on his face, blue eyes haunted by something they don’t understand.  Whatever else she was going to say dies before it leaves her lips.

“But what _happened_ to him?” Eponine presses.  “Come on, are you telling me no one knows?  Someone fucking Google it, for Christ’s sake.”  She hands off the cuffs to Gavroche and pulls out her smartphone as several others do the same. 

It’s Marius who turns something up first, and says, “Known dead: a number of civilians, nine students, one unidentified woman—sorry, ‘Ponine—and one child, in addition to a respectable number of soldiers, by the way.  Further notes…let’s see…the unknown man in the painting _Righteous_ is believed to be the leader of the rebels…reported to have been the last to die…body found in Musain with one other.  Grantaire?” he asks, looking up.

“Yes,” Enjolras says, short and crisp.  Then his brow furrows shallowly and says, “Wait, what do you mean, painting?”

Eponine doesn’t see it, but from the way Marius jumps and squeaks, Cosette pinches him somewhere sensitive.  Eponine sighs and reaches out to poke Marius reprovingly with a foot.  It might be more of a kick.

“It’s possible,” Eponine says in her most diplomatic voice, “that we discovered the existence of a small handful of paintings of us.”  She frowns at Enjolras, who looks blindsided by this revelation.  “Haven’t you looked up the June Rebellion or anything?  It’s hard to miss them, they’re the only ones in existence.”

“I think I covered it once in a history class,” Enjolras says.  “I didn’t see any paintings then.”

“Then you weren’t paying attention,” Joly says, offering his phone to Enjolras.  Eponine can see over the top that he has _Righteous_ pulled up on the screen.  Enjolras takes it and seems to shut down with shock.

It’s a portrait, sort of.  It was clearly painted from memory, or from sketches, not a live model, and instead of the calm expressions typical in paintings from the early 1800’s, its subject is alight with anger.  Gold curls spill around a sharp-cut, youthful face, the cheekbones dusted red and the eyes blazing, lips pressed together with one hand up as if mid-gesture.  The scarlet jacket is only shown through the shoulders, the face taking up most of the image, but the tricolor cockade is visible at a lapel.

It’s Enjolras, as he was back then, fighting passionately with the painter.

“We have the original painting,” Eponine says, blunt.  “Marius found a couple of them up for auction and suddenly developed an interest in classic paintings.  His parents were very proud.”

“You have this?” Enjolras asks, looking up.

“ _Righteous_ , and another that’s probably about as well known,” she says.  She opts not to tell him the name of the other painting they’ve rescued.  “And a sketchbook.”  She nods to the phone in his hand and says, “They’re not, you know, _really_ popular, but they’re unique and they’re the only record of the June Rebellion, so people are interested.  They turn up in textbooks and stuff.  I did some research and it sounds like he painted like no one else at the time.  Beautiful, isn’t it?” she asks, and it’s probably cruel, definitely calculated.  From the way Enjolras looks a little like she’s hit him again, it has the desired outcome.

“Grantaire painted this?”

It’s a stupid question, and Enjolras obviously knows it, his thumb skating just above the capital R in the corner of the image.  Eponine nods anyway, and Enjolras holds the phone back out to Joly.

“I don’t know where he could be,” Enjolras says.  “He might not have remembered yet.”

“We could start canvassing bars,” Courfeyrac offers.  “I doubt things have changed _that_ much.”

Eponine tips a hand back and forth in the air, the universal gesture for ‘maybe.’  “We haven’t had a lot of luck finding people by going out and scouring the streets.  If we’re going to find him, we’ll find him.  Or he’ll find us.”  It’s possible that she’s acquired a degree of serenity in this lifetime.  How delightfully novel.  Enjolras is beginning to look almost outright pained, his lips thin and his face very pale, hands in tight fists by his sides, so she generously decides she’s wreaked enough damage for one day and says, “So, were we going to watch a movie?”

***

Honestly, at this point, Eponine isn’t even surprised when she’s the one who finds him.  One thing that hasn’t changed in two centuries: Eponine knows her way around and exhibits a near-uncanny talent for finding trouble.

It’s been a month almost to the day since she brought it up with the others, and she’s in a nightclub, at the bar, because Courfeyrac was right and things haven’t changed that much.  Eponine is still fighting the world, Marius is still almost pathetically doe-eyed over Cosette, Enjolras is still trying to save humanity from itself one cause at a time, and Grantaire still gravitates toward large quantities of alcohol like a moth to flame.

He looks shockingly like he did back then, she thinks numbly, weaving through the crowd toward him.  His nose hasn’t been broken this time, a sharp jut, but otherwise…it could be 1832 all over again for all the difference she sees.  His curly dark hair is wild, his eyes sharp, his jaw covered with a thin layer of stubble.  His face is still a confusion of hard angles and harsh planes, but somewhat fortunately for him that look is considered relatively attractive in this century, particularly in conjunction with the muscled build of a boxer.  He looks somewhat better fed than he did back then—most of them do, to be honest, Eponine herself among them—and, to her surprise, sober.  He’s behind the bar, rather than waiting in front of it for a drink, dressed in the nightclub’s black uniform.

Eponine slides into a seat and tries to think of a good way to ask ‘so by any chance have you recently remembered dying in 1832.’

She ends up sitting there in silence for a while, watching Grantaire deal with the other customers.  He’s still oddly charming, even if his charm is edged with something cynical and self-deprecating, working his way through the line with the ease of long practice.  Eponine scrambles to think of an order that isn’t ‘remember us’ as he gets toward her, and then it turns out she doesn’t need one.

Grantaire reaches her—his nametag says ‘R’ and nothing else—and gives her a careful scrutiny, and says, “Hi, Eponine.”  Sometimes she forgets how clearly he saw, even through the haze of wine—he had been one of the only ones who knew who she was.  Even Marius hadn’t managed.

All the air rushes out of her lungs, leaving her gasping.  “ _Grantaire_.”

“Did you want something to drink?” he asks, arching an eyebrow at her.

“No, I—wait, yes,” she decides.  “Yeah.  Whatever you have that’s got a lot of sugar in it.”

He nods and makes her a drink.  She’s not sure what it is, except that there are a few different syrups in it and it’s a fluorescent blue color and it’s so sweet she can’t taste any alcohol at all.  Grantaire flags down a coworker while she sips at it and says, “I’m taking my break, I’ll be back in half an hour.  Eponine, follow me.”

She does.  Of course she does.  She’s spent her whole life trying to drag these people back together, hell if she’s letting the last one get away from her.  She’s already wondering how she can get Grantaire out of his shift, how she can get everyone up at this hour, whether someone’s going to need to do something about Enjolras.  Following Grantaire around the dance floor to the couches and chairs sunk into the floor is easy.

She folds herself up on the seat of a chair, denim-wrapped legs tucked up beneath her, and Grantaire sits down across from her.  He even sits the same way he used to, his torso oddly folded in as if determined to take up as little space as possible despite his broad shoulders and his legs stretched out in front of him.

“You _remember_ ,” Eponine blurts when it seems like he’s perfectly willing to sit there in silence until he has to go back to work.

“So do you,” he points out.  “How long have you known?”

“Years,” she says.  “Since I was ten.  We’ve been looking for you.”

That makes him straighten up.  “Who have you found?”

She laughs, short and high and almost frantic with relief.  “Everyone.  Everyone but you, and now you’re here, so I’ve found everyone.  We all remember.”

“Good,” he murmurs, relaxing back against the chair.  “That’s good.  They’re together?  They’re happy?”

Eponine considers that for a moment and says, “Well.  I mean.  They’re dead revolutionaries with some weird trauma.  We’ve all got our issues.  They’re all out for another cause to die for, though, so they’re okay.”

Grantaire shakes his head like he wants to be surprised.  She gets it.  The two of them didn’t die for the dream of a better France, back then, they died for people.  Real people, who they saw every day and cared for.  (Eponine doesn’t want to jump to conclusions, but she has some shrewd suspicions that her infatuation with Marius was small potatoes next to Grantaire’s attachment to Enjolras.  Because, hey, she would totally have died for the cause if she’d been a little more enlightened, she knew what was up with the monarchy and she loves a good fight.  Grantaire wouldn’t have.  He wasn’t the sort to die for an ideal.  Their fearless leader might have all the perceptive power of a brick wall, but _everyone_ else knew about Grantaire.)

“How’d you find me?” he asks after a moment of quiet.

Something about the phrasing of that question concerns her, and she answers slowly.  “I didn’t really do it on purpose.  I’ve just been hitting every nightclub and bar in a few mile radius of the college and working my way out.  Played the odds that I’d find you eventually if you were in Paris.  It’s not just me, either, Courf’s been helping.  And Bousset and Bahorel and Jehan.” 

Okay, look, everyone’s been out at least once looking for him.  Even Enjolras.  Even _Gavroche_ , which she’s not sure she approves of, but Grantaire was kind of an adored older brother to him, so she’s picking her battles here.  And, as Gav so astutely pointed out, she’s twenty-four and he’s almost eighteen so she’s losing ground on being able to argue that he’s too young.  (He also just started that growth spurt she’s been expecting, and is _very suddenly_ a good few centimeters taller than her, so.  There’s also that.)

Grantaire snorts, but nods wryly.  “I can’t argue your logic.  Well,” he says, waving a hand down at himself sarcastically, “here I am.  You can report success.”

She parses that sentence carefully and says, “You’re coming with me to see the others, right?”  Another long pause and she feels her lips curl, anger flaring.  “You’re kidding me.”

“Look,” Grantaire sighs, “I could’ve found you.  I knew—Apollo’s hard to miss at a protest.  I watch the news.”

“You’re telling me that you’re not lonely as shit?”  Eponine knows what she’s talking about, she remembers being one of only a few, remembers an entire lifetime of being _all fucking alone_ , and furthermore something about the look in Grantaire’s eye as he drinks her in is pretty damn telling.  “You’re telling me you didn’t _want_ us to find you?”

Grantaire is a lot of things.  Bitter, angry, usually ready for a fight, prone to defeatism.  But, to his credit, he’s never quite been a liar.  So he doesn’t answer.  Instead he sighs and asks, “How are the others?  Really.”

Eponine sighs too and takes a drink of her something-blue-and-sweet.  “They’re all right.  It’s hard, sometimes, but we get through it.  We call it RTSD, you know, when you end up in the wrong place in town or the wrong weather or whatever and you panic.”  Grantaire nods, an inscrutable expression on his face, and she shifts to happier topics.  “Gav’s taller than me now, it’s goddamn amazing.  Cosette and I grew up together this time, we’re both journalism students.  She and Marius are engaged again—they got married after the barricade, lived a whole fucking life,” she says, shaking her head in something like wonder.  The barricade is so all-consuming.  It’s still baffling to her that they had a life _after_. 

“Are you all right?” Grantaire asks, and that’s right, now she remembers how he knew who she was.  He assumed she was a boy at first, just like she had intended, and had seen her watching Marius, and offered her a drink and company on the argument of misery loving company.  He’d never outright said that it was two idiots in love with people who had no idea getting drunk together, but she could read between the lines.

“Yeah,” she says sincerely.  “I don’t…want that anymore.  And Cosette deserves the best and Marius is—well, Marius is a bit of a moron, actually,” she says with a laugh, and Grantaire laughs too.  “But she loves him and they’re happy and that’s…yeah, that’s what I want this time.  I want them to be happy.  Bahorel and I go out and get in fights sometimes, that’s fun, Feuilly wants my head on a stick when he’s not coming with us.  Joly’s a medical student again,” she says, “and he and Bousset and Musichetta—she was their mistress last time, do you remember?  They’re together again, she somehow ended up owning the coffee shop we usually meet at now.”  She chuckles.  “The place got renamed the ABC and she swears she had nothing to do with picking the name.”

“Les Amis ride again,” Grantaire says dryly, and Eponine nods, smiling fondly.  They sit in companionable silence for a few beats, Eponine sipping at her drink and Grantaire picking quietly at a spot of scarlet paint on the inside of his forearm.  He’s still an artist.  Eponine didn’t expect to feel relieved by that.  “And,” Grantaire says, voice so quiet it almost vanishes into the pulse of the music, “what about Enjolras?”

“He’s still trying to change the world,” Eponine says.  “We found him last.  Just a few months ago, actually.”

“How is he?”

Eponine rakes a hand back through her hair and considers how much to say.  “He’s all right.  A little quieter.  He gets weird sometimes, but so do the rest of us.  He tried to blame himself for the barricade for all of about a minute and a half before I…um, had a word with him.”

Grantaire grins.  It looks rickety, but amused.  “Did you hit him?  You seem like the sort to hit him.”

“I slapped him and yelled for a few minutes,” she concedes.  “It did him a world of good.”  She pauses for a few more seconds, then throws caution (and tact) to the wind and says, “He misses you.”

The grin evaporates.  “No, he doesn’t.”

“Yes he _does_ , he misses you, we _all_ do,” she insists, leaning forward, drink forgotten and something hot flaming up in her chest.  It’s not quite anger, it’s something softer and bigger and brighter.  “Come back with me.”

“No.”

“Why not,” she says flatly.  “Give me one good reason.”

“Because,” he says—half-snarls, the same voice she remembers from a thousand and one fights, “you don’t welcome someone who left their friends to die back into the fold.  That’s not how it works.”

“But you did die on the barricade,” she shoots back, sharp as a bayonet and just as ruthless.  “You _did_.  We don’t know how because Enjolras won’t tell us, but we know that you died in the Musain.”

“That doesn’t change what I did.”  He pauses and adds, “And if he doesn’t want to tell you how I died, I’m sure as hell not going to.”  He shakes his head sharply.  “Look, ‘Ponine, I’m not going to come with you.  They don’t need me.  And they shouldn’t _want_ me.  They’ll get over it.”

“That’s not how it works, you insufferable _bastard_ ,” Eponine snarls back, because she can play fierce and ferocious with the best of them.  “You don’t fucking _earn_ a place with us, we’re your _friends_.  We miss you, all of us.  You come back with me, Grantaire, or so help me God I’ll make your life hell.”

He shakes his head.  He fucking _shakes his head._   Eponine almost smacks him just for the satisfaction of it.  Just to get it off her chest.  She definitely needs to hit _something_ , right this second.

“I’m sorry, ‘Ponine,” he says, standing.  “It’s just…better this way, that’s all.”

“Better for who?” she asks, voice shaking with something she can’t quite define.

Grantaire shrugs.  “Everyone who matters.”

And then he leaves.

Eponine sits there for another minute or two.  Then she downs the rest of her sugary-blue-something, puts a swing in her hips and uses it to get three vodka shots from a passing party of young men, drinks them in rapid succession, and heads for the door, buzzed and heading toward drunk as the alcohol hits her bloodstream.

She pulls out her phone once she’s standing on the curb and dials, listening to it ring.

“’Ponine?” Cosette asks, breathless.

“I—fuck, why is it raining—I found him.  I think I might hit Enjolras again.”

“’Ponine, are you drunk?  Wait, found who—Marius, stop,” she adds in an aside, and her attention is suddenly much more focused.  Eponine might be the equivalent of an axe, brutal and effective, but Cosette is much more like a laser-sighted rifle.  You can feel her focusing in on you from miles away.

Eponine may be drunker than she thought.  She only gets into weird anachronistic metaphors when she’s drunk.

“I may be drunk,” Eponine allows.  “But I only got drunk after I lost him.”

“ _Who_ , Eponine?  And why are you going to hit Enjolras again?”

“Grantaire, I found Grantaire, I’m outside the nightclub he works at.”

“Holy shit, you found _Grantaire_?” Cosette half-yelps, and there’s a loud thud—she’s pushed Marius off whatever they’re on, and he makes a wounded sound as he hits the floor.  “Is he with you?  Does he know who you are?  Does he remember the others?  No, wait, answer the first question.”

“No, he’s not,” Eponine says, scowling.  “That’s why I called you rather than sending out a text to get everyone together.  He remembers everything, but he wouldn’t come with me.  Said it was better this way.”

“Wha—better for _who_?”

“That’s what I asked,” Eponine says.  “He said ‘everyone who matters.’  He thinks we shouldn’t want him around.  I’m definitely going to hit something, Enjolras just seemed like a good default.  Y’know, ‘cause I can’t go punch the National Guard.”

“Uh,” Cosette says.  “Tell you what, ‘Ponine, I’m going to come get you, right now.”  The level of concern in her voice is just not fair, because Eponine hardly ever starts fights when she’s drunk.  Only like twice.  Maybe four times.  The others were all someone else picking a fight and Eponine being generous enough to oblige them.  “How much have you had to drink?”

“Three vodkas and something with a lot of sugar in it.”  Eponine rattles off the location of the nightclub and Cosette sighs.

“I’ll be there in five minutes.  Be standing on the curb with no blood on you.”

“I’ll try,” Eponine says with a snicker, and hangs up while Cosette is still muttering darkly on the other end.

Cosette is on the phone when she arrives, talking with someone—Courfeyrac, Eponine decides—at high speed.  She gestures Eponine into the car and Eponine bolts from her shelter under the lee of the building.  Rain is the _worst_ and Eponine hates being outside in it, she really does, and she thinks this is justified.

“I don’t _know_ why he won’t come back,” Cosette snaps, because Cosette doesn’t _need_ to snarl, she can put on that perfect god-on-high voice that makes anyone questioning her feel like a bug.  “How about you collect whoever you can and get over to Marius’ so that we can figure somethi—I _know_ you didn’t just interrupt me, Courfeyrac, because that would have been incredibly stupid.  Marius’ apartment.  Now.  Get Enjolras.  Maybe don’t tell him and, uh, keep him away from Eponine.”  She jabs the red button on the screen with unnecessary vehemence and eyes Eponine as they careen away from the curb.

“Three vodkas and something sugary, hm?”

Eponine grins, bright and humorless and feral.  “I have no regrets.”

“You can’t punch Enjolras.”

“Sure I can,” Eponine says with an expansive sweep of her hand.  “Watch me.”  She pauses and her smile fades.  “Grantaire…you didn’t know him, before.  I only knew him a little.  But he was kind to Gav and he sat with me sometimes.  Said misery loved company, made me laugh.”

“Misery?”

Eponine makes a vague hand motion.  “He knew I was infatuated with Marius.  He had some experience with unrequited love, and he came and talked to me.  Everyone _except_ Enjolras knew how he felt about Enjolras—even me—so we kind of understood each other.  We got along.  We…”  She trails off, a strange wave of nostalgia washing over her.  Nostalgia for what might have been and might yet be, if such a thing exists.  “I think we could have been great friends.”

“Enjolras is so, so brilliant, and so, so stupid,” Cosette mutters, taking a corner at a slightly-less-reckless-than-normal speed, probably in deference to the thickening rain.  “God save us all.”

“Amen,” Eponine says brightly.

When they get to Marius’ apartment, it’s clear that Cosette worked with her usual brisk efficiency, because they’re the last ones there.  Someday, Eponine will figure out her brother’s uncanny ability to be wherever he needs to be without any apparent mode of transportation.  It’s not going to be today, but she’s going to make it happen.  She’ll slap a microchip on the kid or something.

“Cosette,” Marius says, standing up as they come in.  “Is everything okay?”

Eponine strides in after Cosette and throws out her arms.  She gets like this when drunk—very clear and stable, but prone to dramatics and fond of fighting and laughing.  It makes Cosette’s life very difficult.  Most of the others think it’s the greatest thing they’ve ever encountered.  “I found Grantaire,” she announces with as much fanfare as she can manage.

The room explodes.

Eponine stands back with a slightly smug smile and lets the chaos unfold for a few minutes, then waves her hands and shouts, “Now everyone sit the fuck down!”

They do.  Except for Enjolras.  To the surprise of absolutely no one, including Eponine herself.

“What happened?” he demands.  “Also, are you drunk?”

“I found Grantaire, he works at a nightclub,” she repeats, more serious this time.  “And I’m _definitely_ drunk by this point.”  He looks like he’s considering a remark on her current state of inebriation, so she bulldozes on ahead before he can get them too far off track.  “And I had a chat with R.”

“So where is he?” Joly asks, and he looks so hopeful it kind of kills her.  Just a little.  She remembers watching the two of them, plus Bousset, spinning a single joke into an hour or two of laughter, telling stories to make the other Amis grin at the worst moments.

“He…”  How is she supposed to phrase this, she wonders.  It’s not that Grantaire doesn’t want to see them, nor that he doesn’t want to come back.  “He doesn’t think he deserves to be part of our group anymore.  Because he didn’t fight on the barricade.  He thinks it’s better if he doesn’t come back—better for ‘everyone who matters,’ he said.”  She narrows her eyes at Enjolras, who looks beyond confused.  “Listen, chief,” she says, putting a drawl on the last word.  “I think you should tell us how he died.  Because we’re working on half the information and clearly if we want to drag his cynical depressive ass back where it belongs, we need all of it.  So.”  She snaps her fingers, one hand on her hip and an imperious look on her face.  “Talk.”

Enjolras looks angry, bright and golden and shining, for a long moment.  Eponine sees it, she thinks in the depths of her mind.  She sees what caught Grantaire’s attention and held it back then, sees what it is about that rage that made him capture it in paint.  For a terrifying second, she sees exactly what it’s like to be in love with Enjolras’ light, and so desperate to stand in the sun that she burns herself up, bit by bit, like Icarus.

She really does get neck-deep in the classical metaphors when she’s drunk.

But Enjolras isn’t the sun and he softens, his face falling into something small and grieving and sad as he rubs one palm with the other thumb, a new nervous tic since they found him in this life.  He sits down, finally, folding himself into a chair and leaning forward until his elbows rest on his knees and his hair hands loose around his face.

“We argued, the night before,” Enjolras tells the floor, and the room is silent as the grave, listening.  “I was cruel.”

_Shocking_ , Eponine mouths over his head to Cosette, who makes a violent motion involving what must be Eponine’s hypothetical head.

“He—I was the last of us.  Or I thought I was,” Enjolras says slowly, as if the words are unwilling to fit together.  It’s strange, in their eloquent and charming leader.  “The Guardsmen came up to the second floor of the Musain and found me there.  I faced them and—and one of them called me Apollo,” he murmurs, looking at his hands.  “I was waiting for them to kill me and someone came up the stairs and shouted to wait.”

“R,” Jehan says with total certainty, and Enjolras nods, not looking up.

“He said—he said ‘Long live the Republic, I am one of them.’  And he came and stood beside me and told the Guardsmen to finish us both at once.  I took his hand and we died,” he says, and the words are quiet and emotionless, but their total lack of detail is telling.  “I don’t know why he did it,” he admits, and it’s raw.

There’s a _long_ beat of silence.  She’s pretty sure someone’s crying.  Maybe Joly, maybe Marius, maybe even Enjolras, but they’re hiding it well.

“Sounds like he fought on the barricade to me,” Courfeyrac mutters at last, and more than a few voices agree.  

Eponine leans back against the closest wall and knocks her head against it a few times.  “Idiots,” she sighs, staring up at the ceiling.  “All right.  We need to fix this.”  She blinks a few times.  “How do we fix this?”

“Convince him we miss him?” Jehan offers, and she shakes her head.

“He’ll probably bolt if we all start stalking him.”  She chews on her lower lip.  “Enjolras.”

“Yes?” he says, looking up from the floor.

“You’re a moron,” she announces, straightening.  “And I’m going to show you why.”

She sweeps away into the hallway of Marius’ apartment and rummages through a closet, coming out with a large, heavy frame wrapped in brown paper.  She wobbles when she lifts it—she wasn’t drunk the last time she carried this thing around, and it’s an awfully inconvenient shape—but hauls it back into the living room without mishap.  Tugging the knot loose, she peeled away the paper and laid the painting flat on the coffee table.

“This is the other one,” she says as everyone leans over to peer at it.

“One of his?” Enjolras asks, and she hums in confirmation.  “What’s it called?”

“ _Apollo at Temple_ ,” she says, and his gaze snaps up to hers.

The painting is of a warm room, cluttered with tables and benches and chairs.  A figure in red stands in the center, the painting designed so that all the light seems to radiate outward from him, golden and brilliant.  The faces are vague, the features only suggested, but every figure is recognizable.  Closest to Apollo—Enjolras—are Les Amis, bathed in light and laughing and divine by association.  Combeferre and Courfeyrac are on either side of him, Bousset and Joly side-by-side, Bahorel looming benevolently over affairs with Feuilly’s smaller form near his elbow, even little Gavroche, like a child at the foot of a statue.  Farther out from the center, the figures are dimmer, until, at the edges of both frame and room, they are shadowed and dark.  A man in the corner, dressed in a barely-distinguishable green waistcoat, has a bottle of wine held loose in one hand and a scrap of paper under the other.

“Do you get it now?” she asks, hard and angry and heartless.  Grantaire was barely her friend, before, but she _got_ him, and hell, she took a bullet for Marius, she gets why he died the way he did.  And she needs to destroy something and, right this second, Enjolras looks like he’d rather she have punched him, and that’s rather what she was hoping for.  “I think,” she says, delicate and dangerous, because she’s drunk and hungry for a fight, “that we should give him some time, and that you should sort out how you’re going to welcome him back, before we pull him back into that painting.”

***

The next morning, her hangover is _hideous_ , because, firstly, vodka, and secondly, sugary-blue-something.  She’s not surprised, is her point here, so she’s prepared with a large bottle of painkillers and all the ingredients for a cup of coffee powerful enough to raise  the dead all laid out.  She downs three of the pills, drinks two full cups of water while she waits on the coffee, and makes herself eat some eggs.  By the time she leaves the house, she’s coherent, if not comfortable, and a pair of sunglasses are enough to handle the headache.

She goes and sits down on the steps outside the painting studio on campus, and stays there for two hours, until a voice clears its throat and a paint-spotted hand touches her shoulder.

“’Ponine, why are you stalking me?”

She stands up and smiles her most feral smile and says, “Because.  I think we could’ve been friends last time.  You need friends, you can start with me.  I’m going to convince you to change your mind about the others.  And there’s nothing you can do about any of it.”

She slides her sunglasses down her nose to look over them at Grantaire, who looks a little shellshocked, and she grins again, wild.  “Sound good?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I AM SORRY ABOUT THAT ENDING. But I have plans for the next one, which will be called "shout it out" and will be from Grantaire's perspective and will be about Eponine in sort of the same way a novel about a shipwreck is about the hurricane.
> 
> It'll be fun. And shippy. And painful. Because anything with Grantaire and Enjolras being together is both fun and painful.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked it and want to yell with me, I'm also over at [words-writ-in-starlight](words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com) on Tumblr. I take short fic prompts if you're really dying for something, FYI.


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